Fitkin: Circuit; Relent; Carnal; etc

A pianist himself, Graham Fitkin has written a copious amount of piano music for one or more players. The main piece here is his 2002 concerto for two pianos, Circuit, which was composed for Kathryn Stott and Noriko Ogawa. It illustrates Fitkin's fondness for pithy single-word titles and his tendency towards producing single-movement works. The concerto plays for around 20 minutes, dovetailing the two piano parts so they often seem more like a single, super-keyboard. The fast-slow-fast plan, though, hard and driving in the outer sections, more reflective in the centre, more or less conforms to the traditional concerto form. The other pieces, for one or two pianos, which Stott and Ogawa share out between them, range right across Fitkin's composing career from the mid-1980s onwards, and show very different sides of his musical personality from the brash, hard-edged minimalism that sometimes seems to be his stock in trade.